


The Dream

by celluloidbroomcloset



Category: The Avengers (TV)
Genre: AU, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 02:21:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3592719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celluloidbroomcloset/pseuds/celluloidbroomcloset
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A slightly different ending to the episode The Forget Me Knot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dream

It was her voice that finally awakened him. Her gentle, lilting voice, calling his name.

“Steed,” she said, and it was a voice from a long past. She wasn’t there. She was gone. She had left him. She couldn’t have been there.

“Steed.”

It was a cruel, nasty trick of his subconscious. He would not open his eyes.

“Steed.”

But the fingers in his hair felt real, the breath on his face felt real. The warmth near him, that was real too. Yet it could not be her. Steed opened his eyes. Her smiling face peered down at him, framed by auburn locks. His eyes focused. On her.

“Mrs. Peel?” he said.

“Who else would it be?” she replied.

He struggled into a sitting position, staring at her, trying to make sense of her. She was crouched by the sofa, one long hand resting beside him.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

“Where’s Tara?”

“Who? Oh, that Ministry girl. I’ve no idea. Where should she be?”

“She…”

He paused, running over the quickly fading images in his mind. How long had he been asleep? He remembered the amnesia drug, but surely not, after all this time…yet she was there. Emma was there. He reached out a hand and touched her face. She was real enough. Palpable, her soft skin beneath his fingertips, her soft lips as he ran his thumb along them. She kissed his hand. 

“I dreamed…” he began.

“Dreamed what?”

He sat up against the arm of the sofa. His tie was undone and he could feel his hair fall forward across his brow.

Emma took a seat beside him, a concerned expression creeping over her face.

“You were mumbling something in your sleep. What did you dream?”

“I dreamed that you … I dreamed we weren’t partners anymore. They replaced you with Tara.”

A defined eyebrow arched against him. “Dare I ask if this was a good or bad dream?”

He looked at her and felt tears sting his eyes. “You left me.”

She laughed. “Why? What did you do?”

“Nothing. I did nothing. That’s why you left me. Because of Peter Peel.”

The other eyebrow went up of its own accord. “Why on earth would I leave you because of Peter?”

“He came back.”

“That’s a neat trick.”

“It happened, in my dream. It was a dream?”

He scrubbed his face with his hands, and pinched his own chin until it hurt. He wasn’t still asleep, that much was certain.

Emma apparently could not decide if she should laugh or take the whole thing seriously.

“You’re tired,” she said. “That drug confused both of us.”

“You left me. He came back from the Amazon and you told me goodbye.”

The memory still stung. He recalled a feeling of utter hopelessness, an inability to say or do anything, just let her walk out the door and out of his life. It gnawed at him now, yet she sat beside him.

Emma looked a little put-out.

“Steed, Peter evaporated, along with the rest of his aircraft, seven years ago. There wasn’t any chance he survived that crash. They even searched the jungle. Not a sign. Not that it would make much of a difference, now.”

He raised his head. “What do you mean?”

“Do you honestly believe that I would leave you if Peter suddenly resurrected?”

“He’s your husband.”

“He was my husband.”

“You loved him.”

“I love you.” Her gaze did not waver. “Steed, I love you. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but I love you far more than I ever loved him.”

She sighed. He realized now that she never talked about Peel, had barely even mentioned his name in all the years. No wedding pictures around her apartment; no wedding ring still on her finger. It was as though Peel was just a figment, a glimmer from the past that had no bearing on the future.

“But you did love him,” said Steed, quietly.

She glared at him. “I was a child when I married him, or might as well have been. I loved him the way a girl loves a matinee idol. I loved what he was: his bravery, his intellect, his good looks. I loved the parts, but I don’t believe I ever loved the sum of them. He let me do as I liked, as long as I played the good wife for him. He didn’t really approve of emancipated women, but he cared about me and he wanted me to be happy. I was better at business than he ever thought of being, but because he didn’t understand it he didn’t think it important. It was the same with physics and mathematics. Hobbies he called them, the same as fencing or judo or anything else I wanted to do. He condescended, really. I wasn’t aware enough to see it as condescension. We were happy for awhile. I don’t know if we would have remained that way, but we were happy.”

She took another long breath. “When he died, I wept for him. It was the shock of it more than anything, and it came so soon after my father’s death. It was barely six months after we were married. I mourned Peter, but I mourned him for a far shorter time than I should have. It was more like losing a friend than a husband. I was sad for a time, and then I … moved on.”

She looked at Steed, that same clear-eyed gaze that always spoke of deepest honesty.

“It sounds dreadful and perhaps it was, but I did not love him as deeply as a wife should love her husband.”

It occurred to Steed that she had never said so much. After a few minutes, she spoke again.

“It was after the Cybernauts that I knew what had been missing in my life with Peter. I never feared for his safety as I feared for yours. I spent a few months mourning Peter, Steed. I would spend a lifetime mourning you.”

His heart contracted and new tears formed in his eyes. But he allowed himself to smile.

“What a gruesome thought.”

She smiled. “Well, I’d really rather not mourn at all, but you did have to bring it up. I don’t intend to leave you, Steed, and certainly not for another man.”

Steed looked at her. She once told him that she did not believe in explaining what it meant to love; that the proof was in the way people behaved. In her eyes and her smile, he saw that proof.

It had been such a vivid, complicated dream, but it was just a dream. He held his hand out to her.

“Come here.”

They laid down on the sofa together; the too small sofa, but he did not care. He wanted her in his arms, to feel the physical proof of her presence. He wrapped his arms around her, tucked his face into her soft warm neck as he drew her against his chest. He felt her breath rising and falling, the heat of it against his collarbone, her silken hair against his cheek. He didn’t want to sleep again, lest he awake to find her gone. But somehow, he did not believe it possible. It was the dream that seemed impossible.

“What was your dream about, other than that?” she asked quietly.

“It was … very complicated and very odd. I’ll tell you all about it sometime.” He paused. “Peel looked a great deal like me, you know.”

“He did not. You’re much taller and broader. Peter was quite wiry.”

“I don’t care what Peter was like.”

She nuzzled his neck. “So you thought he looked like you. I have a rather Freudian interpretation of that, but perhaps now is not the time.”

“I should say not.”

He pulled her more tightly against him and wound the fingers of one hand into her hair. The other traveled down her back and sides, reacquainting his waking self with what his dream self had forgotten. She sighed, a beautiful sound full of a contentment that matched his own. Her hand undid one of the buttons on his shirt to stroke his bare chest. It was then that he recalled something she said late – or was it early? – that day.

“I don’t dally with you, Emma.”

Her fingers intertwined with his chest hair. “You do, you know.”

“I mean…”

“I know what you mean, Steed. You say it often enough.”

“How do I say it?”

“ ‘Mrs. Peel, we’re needed.’ Honestly, Steed, how could I leave a man who breaks into my flat to leave me ridiculous messages at all hours of the day and night?”

He laughed and felt her responding chuckle, deep in her throat.

“Would it be very embarrassing if I said I love you, Mrs. Peel?”

“It would be most apropos, Mr. Steed.” She turned her face up to his. “Or is it Johnsy-wonsy now?”

Steed grimaced. “Good God, woman, you know that I cannot abide pet names. Where you came up with that one I shall never know, nor why you proceeded to give us four children.”

She did not answer that, but laughed and pressed a kiss to his lips.

“Coffee, or tea?” she asked.

“Are you playing the little woman today?”

“I will not bring you a pipe and slippers. I will make you tea, however.”

“Stirred counter-clockwise?”

“What a very asinine question.”

She slipped out of his arms and the next minute he could hear her rattling around the kitchen. Steed lay still on the sofa, allowing the final images of his dream to fade into nothingness. He listened to the woman he loved probably endangering glassware in his kitchen. But there was still one image he could not shake, a last awareness of his subconscious fears. 

Steed was recalled to the present by the mail slot opening and closing. He rose and picked up the pile of mail from the floor: two letters from two separate aunts, a request from the Ministry, a bill from his tailor, and the morning paper. Steed’s heart suddenly began to hammer in his chest. He closed his eyes, trying to suppress the terror that seized him. Then he heard the sharp crash of a tea cup on the parquet floor, and Emma’s subsequent and very colorful expletive. He smiled. He opened the paper.

The headline proclaimed a nationwide shortage of something-or-other. He did not finish reading it. He flipped through the pages, his fear dissipating with the last, lingering image of his dream.

“Steed,” Emma poked her head into the room, “I’m afraid that I’ve broken one of those china cups your Aunt Penelope got you last Christmas.”

“Aunt Gertrude, actually. Never mind. I think the old girl gets them wholesale.”

“Anything interesting in the paper?”

“Nothing at all.”

He tossed the paper down onto the sofa. Steed walked towards the kitchen, his tea, and his Mrs. Peel.


End file.
